Meeting the Shadow

Everything with substance casts a shadow. The ego stands to the shadow as light to shade. This is the quality that makes us human.

Good loses some of its goodness, and evil some of its evil. As doubt of the “light” of consciousness increases, so the “darkness” of the soul appears less black. A new symbol emerges in which the opposites can be reconciled. I am thinking here of the symbols of the Cross, of the T’ai-Chi-Tu, and of the Golden Flower. For the individual, the emergen

Projection on the Ego Level is very easily identified: if a person or thing in the environment informs us, we probably aren’t projecting; on the other hand, if it affects us, chances are that we are a victim of our own projections. For instance, Jill might very well have been a prude, but was that any reason for Betty to hate her? Certainly not; Be

Marie-Louise von Franz warns us, on the other hand, not to sentimentalize primitive cultures by assuming that they have no bag at all. She says in effect that they have a different but sometimes even larger bag. They may put individuality into the bag, or inventiveness. What anthropologists know as “participation mystique,” or “a mysterious communa

In our waking life, the ego is like the sun—it illuminates everything but it also blocks out the stars.

In every multiple personality case, you can always clearly identify the shadow. It’s not always evil—it’s just different than the ego. Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how troubl

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. JESUS

Jung’s life-long exploration of the powerful, archetypal forces of the unconscious led him to conclude that they “possess a specific energy which causes or compels definite modes of behavior or impulses; that is, they may under certain circumstances have a possessive or obsessive force (numinosity!). The conception of them as daimonia is therefore

The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of